To enjoy an international market, software developers produce many different versions of their computer program products so the product can be used by people who speak different languages. The internal workings of each version of the program are essentially the same, but the program's user interface and program manuals are translated into different languages. For example, a program originally created for an English speaking user may be translated into other languages before the program is shipped to other countries.
In the past, software developers designed, developed, and tested an original program in one language, then when the program was complete, began the process of translating the program into other languages to create translated or "localized" versions. Such prior translation systems are undesirable because either the release date of the original program is delayed to wait for translated versions to be completed, or the original program is released before the translated versions.
In the past, if translation of the original program into other languages was begun before the original program was completed, i.e., designed, coded, and tested, it was a tedious and time consuming operation to incorporate modifications made to the original program into the translated programs. This is partly because modifications to the original program are often made by different development teams so that "who modified what" is not always clearly documented. To incorporate modifications made to the original program into a translated program, prior methods required that an operator manually review every aspect of the original program's user interface and compare it to the translated program's user interface. Often, this process involved the operator simultaneously reviewing output from each program on a different computer output device.
After the operator had incorporated all of the modifications made to the original program into the translated program, the operator must again review the translated program's output to ensure that attributes of the translated program's output (i.e., graphics) were not affected by the modifications. For example, if text from an original program is modified, the modification of the corresponding text in a translated program can affect such things as borders surrounding the text. The border size is preferably adjusted if the modified translated text takes up more or less space than the translated text on a display screen. Resizing the border around the modified translated text can in turn affect the display of other objects.
It is desirable to have a system that enables a software developer to easily incorporate modifications made to an original program into a translated version of the original program, avoiding the drudgery associated with the above-described process. It is desirable that any modifications made to the original program be easily incorporated into the translated programs, so that all versions of the program can be released to the public at the same time.